TALKIN' TEXAS: Working in cotton fields affects composer

Published 7:00 pm, Thursday, March 25, 2010

"If people could do what they were born to do, there would be less tension in the world."

Those words were spoken by Hannibal Lecumbe of Bastrop, a trumpet player and composer of musical African portraits.

He lives on land his great-grandfather bought a few years after he escaped from slavery. When he's not performing, Hannibal enjoys staying home with his family and tending his garden. He creates music for orchestras, choirs, string quartets and solo viola players. He has composed music and played his trumpet for symphony orchestras in Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore and other places in the U.S. and Europe.

Some critics have compared him to Miles Davis. I had the privilege of visiting with Hannibal, a man with a passion for what he does. He grew up in the cotton patch and was greatly influenced by it.

"I was born a musician," he said. "I realized it when I was 6 years old, in the cotton field in Elgin, Texas. I was demoted from picking in the field to being the water boy because it was too hot and by then my hands were bleeding a lot from being cut. So they bandaged my hands and put me under the wagon and told me 'just bring water to them.'

"On this day in particular, when we got to the field early in the morning, everyone was talking about things that were going on in the community, like who got married, who ran off with whose husband or wife and who was pregnant — those kind of things. And then, as it got to be around one o'clock, the sun became an enemy. People began singing.

"And I saw the effect it had on their body," he said. "And I wanted so much to help them because you could see the heat radiating like spirals from the ground and from their bodies. It was as though they were baking, which literally they were.

"And all of a sudden my grandfather would start this prayer and he let out this song: 'I love the Lord, He heard my cry.' And everybody would respond, singing those same words in a slow rhythm and I got chills. I still get chills when I remember that day.

"And so I said 'I'll help them.' I ran out with a bucket of water. On this day they were so immersed in that power they threw the water in the air. The water was of no use to them. It wasn't what they needed," he said.

It was the music.

"When I was 13 my mother bought me a trumpet and I played my first solo in public at the football game. And I had that same feeling those people had in that cotton patch in Elgin. Then I knew I was born to be a musician. I knew that was my path."

Hannibal was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony to do a musical tribute to Rosa Parks, the mother of the modern day civil rights movement.

"I'm happy to have been chosen to have that music come through me. Some musical sections depict what I felt in that cotton field that day. I used that sensibility in the opening section of the piece. A critic called the music 'shimmering squalls of expression.' It touched him."